(a) Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a data terminal having a telephone function and, more particularly, to a data terminal having a telephone function and a function for affixing priority orders to the information stored therein.
(b) Description of the Related Art
Some portable data terminals, such as cellular phone, personal handyphone system (PHS) and personal digital assistant, have a function for providing priority orders for a plurality of data stored therein. The priority order is generally determined based on the frequency at which the data is used by the user.
For example, in the telephone directory file of the cellular phone, the telephone numbers stored therein can be arranged on the screen of a display unit in the order of the call frequencies at which the cellular phone originates calls to or receives calls from the telephone numbers.
Also in the kana-kanji character conversion function provided in the e-mailer of the cellular phone, the characters and symbols are arranged on the screen in the order of the frequencies at which the characters and symbols are fixed in the character conversion. This function allows the user to effectively use the information stored in the cellular phone.
It is to be noted that “kana” is a phonetic character system used in Japanese language and is generally used by the user to input a sentence via a keyboard. On the other hand, “kanji” is a meaning-defining character system also used in Japanese language, and a single word specified in kana characters corresponds to a variety of kanji characters or a variety of kanji character series. The sentence in Japanese language is generally represented by a mixture of kanji characters and kana characters, because kana character system alone cannot provide a clear understanding in the meaning and kanji character system alone cannot provide the relationship between the characters. Thus, kana-kanji character conversion technique is used to represent the sentence while replacing some of the kana characters by kanji characters retrieved from a kana-kanji conversion dictionary, which provides a plurality of kanji characters or a plurality of kanji character series as candidates for a single word input by the user.
It is noted by the inventor that the information to be used by the user in the portable data terminal differs from time to time depending on the area at which the user stays. For example, assuming that the user stays in a remote city, the user may originate frequent calls to a store residing in the remote city although the user seldom originates a call to the store before that stay in the remote city.